ve been informed, was enabled to pursue his travels
on foot, partly by demanding at Universities to enter the lists as a
disputant, by which, according to the custom of many of them, he was
entitled to the premium of a crown, when luckily for him his challenge
was not accepted; so that, as I once observed to Dr. Johnson, he
DISPUTED his passage through Europe. He then came to England, and was
employed successively in the capacities of an usher to an academy, a
corrector of the press, a reviewer, and a writer for a news-paper.
He had sagacity enough to cultivate assiduously the acquaintance of
Johnson, and his faculties were gradually enlarged by the contemplation
of such a model. To me and many others it appeared that he studiously
copied the manner of Johnson, though, indeed, upon a smaller scale.

At this time I think he had published nothing with his name, though it
was pretty generally known that one Dr. Goldsmith was the authour of An
Enquiry into the present State of polite Learning in Europe, and of The
Citizen of the World, a series of letters supposed to be written
from London by a Chinese. No man had the art of displaying with more
advantage as a writer, whatever literary acquisitions he made. 'Nihil
quod tetigit non ornavit.' His mind resembled a fertile, but thin soil.
There was a quick, but not a strong vegetation, of whatever chanced to
be thrown upon it. No deep root could be struck. The oak of the forest
did not grow there; but the elegant shrubbery and the fragrant parterre
appeared in gay succession. It has been generally circulated and
believed that he was a mere fool in conversation; but, in truth, this
has been greatly exaggerated. He had, no doubt, a more than common share
of that hurry of ideas which we often find in his countrymen, and which
sometimes produces a laughable confusion in expressing them. He was
very much what the French call un etourdi, and from vanity and an
eager desire of being conspicuous wherever he was, he frequently talked
carelessly without knowledge of the subject, or even without thought.
His person was short, his countenance coarse and vulgar, his deportment
that of a scholar aukwardly affecting the easy gentleman. Those who
were in any way distinguished, excited envy in him to so ridiculous an
excess, that the instances of it are hardly credible. When accompanying
two beautiful young ladies* with their mother on a tour in France, he
was seriously angry that more attention